1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to information processing apparatuses and information processing methods for managing access rights to data objects managed in a hierarchical structure.
2. Description of the Related Art
In typical file systems and document management systems, access to data objects (hereinafter, a data object may be referred to just as an object), such as folders and files, is controlled. In these systems, it is common that data objects are managed in a hierarchical structure, typified by a tree structure. Furthermore, since each data object is given access-rights data for managing access thereto by users, such access-rights data is also managed hierarchically. Since access management is carried out on an object by object basis, all data objects to be access controlled need to have access-rights data. For this reason, as the number of data objects increases, the cost of providing and changing access-rights data and the amount of access-rights data itself increase.
To overcome these problems, as a method for managing access rights to data objects in a hierarchical structure, a technique for allowing low-level data objects in a hierarchy to inherit access rights from high-level data objects in the hierarchy has been proposed. According to this method, access-rights settings of high-level data objects are automatically applied to low-level data objects without a user having to apply access-rights settings to the low-level data objects individually. Therefore, not only is the user relieved of the burden of setting access rights individually, but also it is no longer necessary to hold access-rights data for low-level data objects, contributing to reduction in the amount of data. Still, however, when access rights different from those assigned to a group are to be set only to particular objects in the group, for example, the known technique requires the user first to turn off inheritance of access-rights settings and then to set access rights to the particular objects individually. If the inheritance of access-rights settings is turned off, a change to an access-rights setting of a high-level data object is not automatically applied to lower-level data objects. Thus, once the inheritance of access-rights settings is turned off, the user needs to manually set access rights to low-level data objects if the low-level data objects should have the same access-rights settings as those of a high-level data object.
To do this, the user needs to individually determine which data objects should inherit access-rights settings from higher-level data objects before manually applying access-rights settings to the data objects. Such manual access-rights setting may not be difficult for a small number of data objects. However, if access rights of higher-level data objects, which are likely to have many subordinate data objects, are changed, applying the above-described manual setting to those many subordinate data objects is nearly impossible. Thus, with the known technique, users have difficulty in performing flexible access-rights setting.